... and that's greatly appreciated by all contestants. Excellent feedback all around.

It seems like there are a lot of questions about fulfilling the 'connectedness' requirement; I know when I started my project soon after the contest began, I didn't give this much thought--in my mind, "It must involve some type of electronics that are connected to something" just meant any sort of circuitry that isn't completely self-contained. To use my project as an example, I'm dealing with the challenge of sending high amperage power through a slip ring that must be compact and low-noise--seems like that's connecting electronics to something, but not in the more traditional data networking sense.

Can you comment on this requirement? Do I (and many others) need to worry about our projects being at a disadvantage compared to IoT entries? I don't want to throw together some unnecessary 'cloud interface' just to fulfill the requirement.

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The point is to have something that can be used in other applications. So if you're showing how to transfer data from a device to the internet, can other devices adapt that same interface? But it doesn't have to be the internet, it just has to transfer data in some way. One example I can think of is a sensor network. The mechanism that gathers data from the sensors can be documented as the connected part of the project.

The vast majority of projects these days already have some type of connectedness (that's why IoT is a buzzword). So take a look at your project and see what part of it is connected. Document that so that it's clear to the judges what that's all about.